Stranger than fiction

[trinityvixen]

I watched the press conference with Governor Sanford yesterday. It was one of the worst attempts to defuse a situation as ever I saw. I understand that he's supposed to be "unconventional," and many of his constituents probably prize shooting from the hip over practiced, careful speechifying, but it was just embarrassing to watch.

It takes this article four paragraphs to get to the Gov's official declaration, which, believe me, is three times faster than Sanford managed. When one is caught in obvious shenanigans, the best thing to do is come forward and say, upfront, what's been going on. Instead, he meandered through all the plausible reasons why he might have disappeared for a week, apologized to friends, family, and voters, mentioned a reporter he'd had a run-in with at the Atlanta airport, and then copped to being out of the country on a booty call. He then went into embarrassing detail about how he'd met this person innocently at first, and how that had changed, and so on and so forth. Dude, you're here to tell people why you up and vanished without leaving your contact information, not trace your every thought process since your affair started. Great, you cheated on your wife; we do not need the play-by-play. (Unless it's going to lead to awkward questions like it did in Senator Ensign's case where he might have paid his mistress more, with GOP funds, while he was schtupping her and fired her when the affair was over.)

Of course, the real "news" here is that Sanford was a 2012 presidential hopeful and that looks like it won't be happening any more. I hope that such dashing of his chances happen for the right reason--for the fact that the executive leader of an entire state went AWOL and didn't think to make any provisions (like talking to the Lt. Gov!!!) to deal with state business while he was away. I don't give a shit who you boned unless your boning breaks the law (which, possibly, Ensign's firing of his mistress could have done--his paying her more while she had sex with him doesn't look great either). But you cannot just abandon your post as president. You want ass? Call up Hugh Hefner, go to Camp David, shag your weekend away, but for the love of the great noodly one, STAY IN TOUCH.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

There are really two things to be done about faithless politicians, since we can't fire them just for having affairs. One, we could stop caring about who they fuck until it breaks the law. Or Two, we could better educate people to stop thinking that men have permission to cheat and women do not. Neither solution is going to be easy as they would require us to stop finding sex itself salacious and stop discriminating on issues of gender, respectively. I'm not sure which I think is less possible to accomplish.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Indeed. But note that neither of those things is, "elect non-male or non-middle-aged politicians." The only way to ensure that a politician doesn't cheat is castration.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I dunno, maybe we should try different electoral processes--term limits on legislators? Chastity belts for the 45-60 set?

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Even then it's not that sure-fire; there are at least some recorded stories of Chinese eunuchs being caught performing sexual acts with the concubines.